Giftedness Reflected in the Main Characters in the Harry Potter Series

Hermione
Hermione Granger is the one who is closest to the stereotypical image of the gifted child. She behaves and believes firmly in following the rules, never questioning them or the teachers who impose them. She reads all the time, and seems to remember everything she reads. She studies hard, loves to get A's, and is the top of her class in almost everything.

However, when Hermione can't learn by reading, she can get frustrated. She is not particularly good at flying since that requires a physical skill and she quits Professor Trelawny's Divination class, taking instead "Arithmancy," which relies much less on intuition. She is clearly more logical than Divination requires a student to be.

Hermione is also essentially friendless at the beginning of the first book. She has trouble making friends and is seen as a know-it-all. While she does become friends with Ron Weasely and Harry, we never see her develop any friendships with other girls. This is not unusual with gifted kids. Gifted girls often prefer boys as friends, while gifted boys often prefer the friendship of girls.

Ron Weaseley
Ron Weasely represents the gifted child who is overlooked. For one reason or another, some gifted children fall through the cracks. It could be that they don't stand out like the Hermione Grangers do. They are not particularly interested in studying academic subjects, but may be exceptionally good in other aspects of life. Certainly that is true for Ron's brothers, Fred and George, who constantly get themselves in trouble and seem to take pride in the fact that they do well enough to get by, but no more than that. However, they are quite good at creating new spells that they use for joke materials and also later demonstrate quite an aptitude for business.

Ron must follow in their footsteps as well as the footsteps of his two older brothers, who were both prefects at the school. One was also a star quidditch player, who was offered a spot on the national quidditch team. (Quidditch is a wizard sport something like soccer played in the air on brooms.) Rather than trying to compete with his brothers, Ron becomes a classic underachiever who doesn't bother to try. It is safer for him not to try than to try and fail to live up to expectations people have of him based on their knowledge of his successful brothers. This is especially true because Ron, like Fred and George, are always being compared to their older brother Percy, who embodies all traits their mother thinks all her children should have.

Because Ron does not do particularly well in school, many people assume that he doesn't have the ability. However, his advanced cognitive ability is clear in the first book when Ron demonstrates his talent for chess. Ron also demonstrates excellent leadership skills at the end of the first book, when he not only plays a masterful game of chess, but also takes charge during that chess game, making sure that the task they must complete gets done, even if it means he must sacrifice himself.

Harry Potter
Finally we have Harry. The first gifted trait we recognize in Harry is his natural ability in flying a broom and playing Quidditch. Not only has Harry had no experience playing this wizard sport before, he is new to the entire wizard world. He had never seen Quidditch played before or even knew what Quidditch was. However, he becomes the first first-year student in a hundred years to get on a Hogwart's Quidditch team.

That natural ability as a sports hero does not carry over into other aspects of his life at school. In spite of his winning moves on the Quidditch team as well as being the "boy who lived" and the one responsible for the "demise" of Voldemort, Harry does not seem particularly popular at school, nor does he seem interested in becoming popular. He has a limited number of friends and he is at times socially awkward. The same can be said for many gifted children, who often seem to prefer a few close friends to a large circle of friends and acquaintances and who are sometimes uncomfortable in social situations.

Harry does well in school, but unlike Hermione, he does not stand out. He is not exceptional, but he is not an underachiever like Ron. Also unlike Hermione, Harry will question authority and rules when he believes they are wrong or unfair. Like many gifted children, Harry is extremely concerned about fairness and justice and will stand up for those whom he believes is being treated unfairly, regardless of the consequences.

Perhaps Harry's most obvious gifted characteristic, however, is his intense concern with good versus evil and right versus wrong. The immediate focus of this concern over good versus evil is, of course, Lord Voldemort and his followers. Harry risks his life to do the right thing and help vanquish the evil Lord Voldemort. However, it's not just grand issues of good versus evil that Harry tackles. He also tackles good and evil on a smaller scale of right versus wrong. He stands up to Malfoy, for example, in the first book when Malfoy takes Neville's "Rememberall." Harry also, like many gifted children, has a strong sense of fairness and justice and will get quite upset and even angry when anyone is treated unfairly. It doesn't matter who the victim of the injustice is, he will try to make things right, even if it means he could get in trouble.

Quick Summary of The Harry Potter Story
Themes of Giftedness in Harry Potter